Read It Now Reviews #16 – Interview with an Alicorn, Talking Pony Syndrome, Changes, All in Bad Taste, The Motion of the Stars · 9:26pm Jan 30th, 2015
Today in the latest issue of “TD hates everything,” our host ventures into unknown territory, sampling a couple more of the Cupcakes-prompt stories from the More Most Dangerous Game contest, as well as a My Little Dashie-based story by M1Garand8 and Carabas’s post-apocalyptic entry into the same contest. Just to round things out, he also found a SS&E story in the featured story box that he still isn’t sure if he is right about. But this being TD hates everything, he can’t let that stop him!
Today’s reviews:
Interview with an Alicorn by M1Garand8
Talking Pony Syndrome by shortskirtsandexplosions
Changes by jmj
All In Bad Taste by KitsuneRisu
The Motion of the Stars by Carabas
Interview with an Alicorn
by M1Garand8
Slice of Life, HumanFor fourteen years, she had been under media scrutiny since her discovery and her adoptive family fighting for her right to be recognized as a rightful citizen. For fourteen years, she had grown up as the only sapient pony in a world full of humans.
Now, Celestia is finally ready to tell her story.
Why I added it: M1Garand8 thought I wouldn’t like it, but he’s a bro.
Review
He was right.
This story is basically a much less sappy My Little Dashie, with a family which is much more supportive and willing to let Celestia go out into the big wide world, even fighting in court for her recognition as a person. Now a young adult, Celestia is interviewed by a talk show about her life growing up, and the various hardships of going to school in Singapore, as well as serving as an inspiration for a children’s television show…
The story felt a bit empty, more like a response to My Little Dashie than any sort of complete story of its own, and it doesn’t really end up going anywhere in the end.
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Talking Ponies Syndrome
by shortskirtsandexplosions
Slice of LifeIt's a beautiful day in Ponyville. Then again, every day is a beautiful day for Derpy Hooves.
Why I added it: SS&E is a good writer.
Review
Someone in the comments to this story suggested that Derpy had aphasia – that is to say, she is able to hear, but she can’t understand words, nor speak sensibly herself. That might explain the weirdness of this story, but ultimately I don’t think it can make me enjoy it.
Derpy Hooves goes through her day without speaking, and while other ponies speak to her, we never get any dialogue out of them – we see a few of them write things to her, or otherwise indicate things to her, and her indicate things to others, but without any dialogue, it all feels terribly awkward. Assuming that SS&E was deliberately going for the aphasia angle, the story makes sense, but it ended up being off-putting in how purple it was, and how awkward it felt. It was heavily laden with awkward adjectives, and the descriptions of ponies talking just felt weird – a problem I myself have experienced when writing about a pony talking without the reader “hearing” the dialogue. It really seems to be something better suited for animation rather than the written word.
I thought the second half of this piece was decent enough, but as noted, the story frequently felt awkward and the first half felt like a slog through something very weird. If you’re willing to put up with it, it is alright in the end, but you aren’t really missing anything if you pass this by.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
Changes
by jml
Gore, Tragedy, Sad, DarkSugarcube Corner has been closed for a week and the only clue as to what is going on is a letter sent to Rainbow Dash.
Why I added it: jmj is a good writer.
Review
Honestly, I pretty much guessed the ending of this story from the cover image and the theme.
Pinkie Pie has closed down Sugarcube Corner for the last week and invites Rainbow Dash over because she’s feeling really depressed – suicidal, even. Rainbow Dash cheers her up, but given who Pinkie Pie really is, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all…
This is a Pinkie Pie as a serial killer story, and it ends with some really bad times for Rainbow Dash (and Pinkie Pie, debatably). If you want to read a story about Pinkie Pie murdering Rainbow Dash for creepy reasons, you’ll enjoy this story – it is well-written and reasonably well-executed, and it isn’t a gorefest.
If you don’t want to read something like that, though, I’d advise you to steer clear.
For me, though, I couldn’t really bring myself to enjoy it, I think because I already knew what was coming, and thus it lost all its shock value for me. I simply am no longer naïve enough to such stories to be shocked, and thus the whole thing sort of feels a bit inevitable.
Recommendation: Not recommended to anyone who doesn’t want to see a pony get murdered by a serial killer.
All In Bad Taste
by KitsuneRisu
Dark, Alternate UniverseAll the ingredients are there to make a cupcake. There’s the friendly visit. There’s the crazy friend. There’s the demented torture. But add that to a psychological perspective, a look into the true rationale of insanity, and a little twist of lemon, and you have something rather special indeed.
This is cupcakes. Re-imagined. Re-formed. Re-baked.
Why I added it: KitsuneRisu is a good writer.
Review
I really should stop reading the stories with the Cupcakes prompt.
Fluttershy comes to in the kitchen of Sugarcube Corner, hanging there, unable to move. Pinkie Pie wanted her there because she was missing something. Apparently, Pinkie Pie has been cooped up in here for a month, and she can’t laugh anymore. She can hardly feel anything. And, somehow, she thinks that the only solution to this is to do horrible things to Fluttershy, torturing her psychologically (and physically, though to a lesser extent), because pain is at the core of comedy, right?
But it isn’t working, and Pinkie Pie thinks she might need to go a bit further.
There is an explanation for Pinkie Pie’s behavior here, and I thought it was a rather clever idea, but I’m not really sure if it saves the story for me – the story was well-written, but I didn’t really end up enjoying it, and felt kind of disconnected from it. I think part of the problem is that the story has no real shock value – Pinkie Pie tortures someone, yadda yadda, what’s the point? There isn’t really anything shocking at this point about Cupcakes-esque stories, and consequently, while the ending might have been a good twist on a story like this if I hadn’t seen similar stories before, I was too disconnected by the end to really end up caring.
It wasn’t bad, by any means, but I suspect I simply have lost the ability to really connect with stuff like this.
Recommendation: Not Recommended.
The Motion of the Stars
by Carabas
Gore, Sad, Dark, AdventureOnce upon a time, Equestria burned in the fires of war.
Now it falls to two sisters to reclaim what they can.
Why I added it: Carabas wrote Moonlight Palaver, which did fairly well in the Outside Insight contest, and several folks recommended this story to me.
Review
Another “small group of survivors travels through the wasteland to make the world right once more” story, this one ended up working better for me than Life in the Wasteland did, as it gave a very personalized, two-pony view of the apocalypse. We see Rarity struggling to find some way to make the world work again, to make the Sun rise in the morning and set at night once more, but she was injured in the Great War, and is growing increasingly infirm. Meanwhile, Sweetie Belle, an adult now, helps to take care of her and looks after her, but can’t help but aid her sister in yet another dangerous journey into Canterlot to try and find the books that contain the magic that can yet save the world.
As they travel across the scarred landscape, we both see flashbacks to what happened in the past, as well as some of the threats of the blasted wasteland that is now Equestria – both innate and pony in nature.
This story references the Capricious Crown of the Capra, a character created in Moonlight Palaver, and a great war with the capra which resulted in the death of everyone that they cared about. It is all very nicely and fairly viscerally described, but…
I’ve seen the story too many times before. It was well-written, well-executed, and mostly did what it was trying to do. I would like to say that the biggest problem it had was that the climax, while climactic to some extent, didn’t really feel climactic enough on Rarity’s end – the spell that Rarity found just wasn’t epic enough, and I wanted to really feel something awesome there, when instead the awesomeness mostly happened offscreen.
But I’m not sure if the climax was really the problem so much as the fact that this story was, fundamentally, generic. I’ve read this story before, and this didn’t really put any sort of twist on it. It didn’t really do anything that excited me. It all felt almost rote – the journey to fix the world, the visions of the scarred and beautiful wasteland landscape, a spot of hope in some fellow wanderers, a spot of fear in slavers, the dangers of the wasteland environment, and even the climactic spell all felt like things I’ve seen in stories like this before, and this particular remix of these elements, while decent enough, never really went above and beyond. I never saw anything here that I felt was a new, fresh idea; it was all just a very pretty execution of something I’ve seen before, without any real novelty at all.
If you want to read a 15,000 word long description of Rarity and Sweetie Belle contending with a post apocalyptic Equestria, this is as good a place as any to go. However, it isn’t really anything you haven’t seen before, so unless you are either naïve to the genre or really want to read another story of this type, you don’t really need to spend the time reading this. Some of you might be taken in by the beauty of the piece, but I walked away from the experience of reading it not feeling enriched.
It wasn’t bad at all; it just didn’t feel like it justified my time reading it.
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Summary
Interview with an Alicorn by M1Garand
Not Recommended
Talking Pony Syndrome by shortskirtsandexplosions
Not Recommended
Changes by jmj
Not Recommended
All In Bad Taste by KitsuneRisu
Not Recommended
The Motion of the Stars by Carabas
Not Recommended
The next set of stories will likely be the last set of “Read It Now” reviews for a bit; it has been a while since I went through my backlog, and now that I am getting near to clearing my “Read It Now” bookshelf it seems like as good a time as any as to head back out into my other reading list.
Number of stories still listed as "Read It Later – High Priority": 192
Number of stories listed as “Read It Later”: 1544
As fair a critical assessment of The Motion of the Stars as any. Thank you for putting the effort into such a detailed review.
Also, a phrase like 'the beauty of the piece' still gladdens my heart in spite of the overall lack of recommendation.
2758447
The changelings were the best part of the story. The problem is that the rest of it didn't really engage me enough because I already knew what was coming; it had little shock value, and thus the ending, while decent enough, didn't end up hitting me very hard. I can appreciate the cleverness of the idea, but I couldn't actually appreciate the story, if that makes any sense.
The best part about following TD for reviews is i never have to read anything.
2758456
I think this is par for the course when the prompt IS to write 'cupcakes'.
I mean, I get you. I totally get you. But pretty much the problem here is that you don't like the fact that the story is based (and has to be, mind you) off the original because the original will ALWAYS diminish anything that comes after it based on it.
In my defense, I was aware of this, which is why I kept the actual shock value to a minimum. That was on purpose so that it didn't really distract from the rest of the story where it could be elevated to make it something slightly different.
It IS very difficult to actually get a story like this across. I kinda felt that the whole thing was really constricting. But then again, that's the point of the competition, eh?
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
2758648
I agree; the Cupcakes prompt was hard to use well, if you were sticking at all close to the original.
This was something of a problem with a number of stories in the competition - several of the Fallout: Equestria based stories also suffered a bit from doing something which I'd already seen and could well-anticipate, and the My Little Dashie stories were already heavily constrained by what they could do with the story due to the specificity of the setup. The issue I cited with your story was exactly why I kept my own entry so short - I was trying to make sure that they had enough time to decide on what the story was about that I could throw them off-balance without being so long that they stopped being quite so invested because they already "knew" what was going on, though I also had the advantage of a more open-ended prompt. I think that was ultimately why I liked Panacea more than I liked your entry - both stories feature a Pinkie Pie who is torn about hurting people, but Panacea changes things up much earlier in the story, and the story is much more focused on trying to prevent another Cupcakes from happening, whereas yours doesn't really tell us that we're not reading a Cupcakes variant until we're 5,500 words in, and then the story ends immediately afterwards.
2758466
All in Bad Taste would have worked fine if I hadn't had it in mind that it was a Cupcakes-type story, but because I did, the ending just didn't hit me hard enough because I wasn't invested enough in the characters in the story by that point. It may end up working better for other folks, but for me, at least, I just couldn't invest enough for the payoff to make me feel rewarded. I can appreciate what it was doing, but I couldn't actually appreciate the story itself - because I already "knew" that Pinkie Pie was going to murder Fluttershy, I wasn't as invested in her survival as I would have been if I didn't "know" that was how it was going to end, so when she wasn't murdered at the end of the story, it didn't hit me as hard as it would have had I held out hope for her survival. My lack of investment in the characters as a result of what I "knew" meant that the reveal at the end wasn't enough to really make the story good for me.
2758720
Absolutely. Well! I stuck to my guns either way. =) But hey, thanks for being honest about it. I really like all this feedback. And I don't care but I'm gonna take this as close to a Titanium Dragon approval as I can get, hahaha.
And I like your approach also, it's strategic. It really makes sense in that you're playing off the expectations of the reader as a factor. On the other side, my approach was to simply give clearer motivations. I was hoping that filling in some blanks would have replaced the tedium of reading the same concept over and over again, like a mystery unfolding.
Either way, man, good luck for the competition. I hope you do really well! I hope we all do!
2758753
Well, as far as approval goes, I adore Barrelled Up; it is one of my favorite RariJack shipfics.
Which really says something, considering that it isn't actually a RariJack shipfic. Well, mostly anyway.
2758783
Hehehe, thanks man. =)
Ice read your reviews, and thank you for doing that. It's always good to see other people's opinions of stories. Though I have a contest entry, and I was wondering if you would check it out.
2759140
Sorry, I'm pretty burnt out on reading entries from the More Most Dangerous Game competition. I might get around to more of them later, but at the moment I think I'm just about through with them.
If I do end up reading yours, I'll let you know.
2759155 I know the burnt out feeling. I've had to step away from that project (and obsessing over it) and work on my main project, Dust on the Wind. But I still think about it. Those who have read it like it. But I'm always looking for more opinions. So, thank you for your response.
2758539 I lolled.
Thanks for the review again, sir. I wish I could figure out what it was you liked about whichever of my stories you liked to duplicate that.
You really guessed the ending from the picture? Dang. I was really trying hard on this one to be obscure. I really hoped that the cover picture would be more like 'Huh? That's totally wrong, idiot" and then they'd come back at the end and nod gently to themselves. BUT, it wasn't REALLY Pinkie Pie. It was whoever had inherited her skin. I decided to leave the character unnamed because she doesn't really know who SHE is and has to live vicariously through others ... to the extreme a bit, but still through others. So Dash convinces X not to give up and renews her faith that everything will be okay if she just gives it one more go. Sealing her own doom by doing so, but hey, she did a good deed, right? Anyway, thanks for the review. My next story is going to be different by the way. It's still dark but it's not horror and will focus on adventure. I think adventure stories are sort of pointless and don't really engage on anything below the surface but that's what I am interested in writing right now. I hope you will come on the little adventure with me, good sir. As always, I appreciate your time and effort in reading my stories.
By the way, I was out of town and I just got back home or else I would have commented sooner.
2763338
It's alright.
And yeah, I totally did. That may be a sign that I'm a serial killer or something, but I saw the title, saw the eyes, knew what the prompt was, and was like "Yep, Pinkie Pie is going to skin Rainbow Dash and wear her skin."
Though it probably doesn't help that for many years, my friends and I would answer the phone and make some comment about how we weren't there, we'd just killed them and stole their face.
2763548
That sounds insanely beautiful. Sick... but beautiful. I wasn't 100% about how the story was pulled off. I was more like 80% on it but I wrote the whole thing in one day, in one sitting. It was fun though. Did you get the themes though? The search for individuality, struggle to cope with age, and the irony in Dash convincing Pinks to live? I tried to make it more than just X kills Y for no reason. It had reason; the need to make changes in one's life in order to be who it is they want to be. I tried to show flawed characters with whom people could Identify. The search for identity is one of the driving forces of human psychology and "Pinkie" is just that need magnified, twisted, and set to the maniac setting.
I'm sort of harping but I actually put thought into this one and felt like it had a chance. I wanted it to be more than X kills Y. It had universal issues that the characters are struggling with and turn to one another for relief through the power of friendship. And then that resolution leads to something terrible.
P.S.-- I'm not me. I'm just wearing his face right now. (I love that. I should make it my phone's leave-a-message message.)
2763573
I got the themes, and I thought they were neat enough, I just... didn't actually end up engaging very much with the story, because I knew it was going to end with one character skinning another one and wearing their skin. I think the problem was that because I knew what the story was about, I spent the whole story just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and as such, I never really ended up caring about what happened inside it.
This was, I think, the same problem I had with another Cupcakes prompt story, All In Bad Taste, which was also probably objectively a fairly decent story, and which didn't even end with Pinkie Pie murdering Fluttershy, but because I spent the whole story waiting for the other shoe to drop, I never really engaged with the characters in the story. Even though it didn't end that way, I just didn't end up caring that much, and I think I would have appreciated the final twist a lot more if I hadn't "known" what was going to happen.
2763599 You've been shell shocked, sir. You've seen too much. Thanks for the explanatory statement.
I feel that way with Robert Bloch sometimes. He writes so well but his stories are predictable (I think because he was one of the founders of modern horror) that it hurts. I just look at it and say "and the robot kills him" and then spend an hour reading until the robot kills him.
2763617
I sometimes make images for the Too Soon boards. I have been doing that since I found out about Too Soon like, a decade ago.
I outlined a story after Robin Williams committed suicide which involved him going to Equestria, having a party with Pinkie Pie, and then feeling awful because he was never going to see his family again. Thanks to the power of the pony princesses, they were going to group up and send him back to the real world.
But, sadly, when he got back to the real world, he would be back in his hung, paralyzed human body. And the story was going to end with "Well, I guess I'm just going to have to hang around until someone finds me."
2763625
I laughed, I cried, I puked, I died.